Toby Olson - Seaview

THEY STRUGGLED TOGETHER UP THE ENCLOSED SPIRAL. He stayed to the outside of her and pressed his hand on the cold stone for support, his bag scraping against the curve as they ascended. She wasn’t limp, but she was staggering, and it was little more than his body on one side and the inner wall on the other that she felt was keeping her up. She knew it certainly wasn’t her breath, because she couldn’t get much of it, and she was trying to mask her wheezing, keep it from bothering him, and that too took its effort. It took them a long time, but the tower was under forty feet high, and when they finished climbing, she had something left.

They came out into the cool of the late afternoon air, and she found that if she leaned back against the tower’s upper core she could stand. He let her do it, slipping the bag from his shoulder, leaning it against the notched parapet. It was still heavily overcast, but it had stopped raining, and even as he watched the cloud cover again, the sky began to clear, and some sun came through, and there were soft shadows on the stone. He looked at her, and they both managed parts of smiles. He stood at the parapet that came to the level of his lower chest and looked away from her and out. He had expected the sight line to be better than it was. He could see the whole of the upper green on top of the hill over which the gliders had come, but he could not see much farther. Off to the right, and higher still, he could see the sixth tee and the tall brush at the sea’s edge that came up to it. There were two hand carts in front of the tee and what looked like a couple of golf bags lying on it. Smoke was rising in places across the course, from sources beyond his vision. There were no longer any sounds of the kind they had heard earlier. He could just see the edge of the green below him and the far edge of the fairway running back from it. He could not see the cart or the gliders from where he was.

He turned back from the notched outer wall and walked to where she was leaning against the inner core and pressed against it beside her. Their shoulders touched, and he felt a little stab where he’d been hit when his forearm brushed her, but he did not move it away, and he put his hand down and took her hand.

“It’s kind of like we’re little people on top of a rook from a chess set,” he said, and she laughed halfheartedly in agreement. His other hand came up and touched her cheek and then came down again. They stood, leaning and looking over at the wall in front of them. The sun brightened the notches in some places. It was as if they were waiting for something. She had been waiting for her breath to come back, and it did. He had no idea what he might be waiting for. They continued to stand there, each gathering strength and as long as they had that task, their postures didn’t seem awkward to them, but after a while his mind began to fidget, and he felt he had expectations. They were here now. They had done things. They could even smell the sea. They were so close to it, they could walk over to it were the circumstances other than they were. What had happened down below had not thrown either of them. They had been so much in it that they had not had space to think about it, but now they had that space and time.

She felt her illness coming back to her, unsullied again, and she sensed she had the final closure back, contained in her body, and she had no need for talk, explanations, or plans. He had none of what she had, and he felt odd and restless and uncomfortable. He would have talked, and he did feel that talking would be very useful to him, and he tried hard to think of something to say, but he could not think of a single thing. Half-ideas formed in his head, but when he tried to move them into words they seemed to dissolve and go away. She knew that when he had touched her cheek fleetingly a moment before, that had been it, about all she would get, not near enough, but all.

She did not exactly wonder why the young boy messenger had to die so violently down there. She needed nothing in the way of philosophical explanation of such things and never had. But he was so sweet and harmless, she thought, the place of his death so isolate from human concern, and she did think that it would have been good to note the circumstances through tender talk. Who else was left to give some proper weight to his passing but the two of them here? She said a silent prayer of sorts for the boy, something outside her own concerns and Allen’s as well, something she realized was in all ways beyond him as a possible thing to do. When she was finished, she thought to help him out, and she said:

“Help me to sit down by the wall there, please.”

He took her arm and helped her over to the wall and squatted down as she lowered herself. Then he got up and got his golf bag and brought it over to her. When he moved it, he felt something about its weight, and then he remebered the gun and the binoculars he had put in the zipper pouch. He handed the bag down to her so she could use it as an awkward pillow, and she took hold of it, propping it up beside her against the outer wall, and leaned against it. The smell of its leather was familiar and almost human. He reached in and pulled his four-iron by the head out of the bag’s mouth, and then he squatted beside it and got a handful of Rams out of the small zipper compartment and stood up.

“The gun and the binoculars are in the pouch,” he said. “I guess I better do something, better go over there and see what’s up, get us some help out of here, okay? Will you be okay?”

“Okay, right,” she said. “I’ll be here. Be careful.”

“Okay,” he said, and he seemed ready to speak again, to say something more extended, but the air came out of his mouth without any words in it except, “Bye-bye.” He raised his hand and waved his fingers at her, and she raised her own hand and waved in the same way back at him. He turned then and went to the opening in the core, and then he started down the spiral.

SHE APPRECIATED THE SOFT BREEZE THAT CAME IN through the half-open window on the other side. She was where he had told her to stay, pressed in the wedge between seat and door, her right leg up and stretched out on the seat. Her arm lay in her lap, and the breeze cooled the sunburn she had gotten from having it on the window sill as they were driving cross country. She could see much of the staggered line of uniformed men at the edge of the campground. She watched them, but they did nothing of interest. After the group of Indians came down the hill from the golf course and one of them had spoken with one of the uniformed men, she watched as some of the guards left and the Indians took their places. The Indians wore various kinds of headdresses and buckskin shirts, but from the waist down they were dressed in jeans and work pants and tennis shoes. They looked, even in their rough wear, more interesting than the uniformed men, more various in their gracefulness in standing. She watched to see if they did anything she could spend time with, but they, like the military men, did very little.

She knew she was not biding her time any longer. It was just that she felt inert right then, and the thing she would soon do would get done when she felt like doing it. It was not an important thing at all for her. It was just to make a formal ending. She was already done in the way she had to be, and after she went and got in the tent, she would just do what she wanted to do.

It was no specific event. He had done nothing out of the ordinary, and she could not really even think of it as a slow accumulation of things. It was not her birthday, though she had been thinking recently of its passing a month ago, and she had been thinking of Annie, too, but not in any serious way. All she knew was that when she had awakened in the bed in the motel that morning, she had heard some birds singing outside; she had listened to their clear songs, and then she knew that she would be going.